Summary
In a chiaroscuro dance of domestic tension, a husband's corrosive jealousy ignites when the household butler delivers a mysterious letter to his wife. Snatching the envelope, he reads only the salutation 'My Dearest Sweetheart' before disintegrating the paper in rage. His wife's tearful supplications fall on deaf ears as he acquires a revolver, transforming suspicion into lethal potential. Unbeknownst to him, the missive heralds her father's arrival. As the wife departs to welcome her parent, the cook—seizing opportunity amid chaos—drapes herself in her mistress's abandoned gown. This sartorial masquerade culminates in a dimly lit dining room embrace with the butler, precisely as the husband returns. Blinded by fury, he discharges his weapon. The cook's theatrical collapse—unharmed but convincingly dramatic—prefaces the wife's entrance with her father. In the harrowing silence, the husband's catastrophic misinterpretation unravels: the letter's true contents lay unread, the 'lover' a phantom of his paranoia. Cook and butler emerge laughing from the shadows, their charade exposing tragedy's razor-thin proximity to farce.
Synopsis
The jealous husband suspects that his wife is fickle but cannot discover any evidence until the butler hands her a letter one morning. He snatches it from her, and only waiting to read "My Dearest Sweetheart," tears it up and storms about the room. The wife pleads with him, but he goes out and buys a revolver. The wife, changing her clothes, also goes out. The cook, spying the discarded dress across her mistress' bed, puts it on, in celebration of an evening with the butler. When the husband returns and sees, in the half-lit dining room, the cook with his wife's dress on, in the arms of a man, he draws his revolver and fires. The cook, though unhurt, falls to the floor. The husband turns in the hall just as his wife enters with a man by her side. The wife introduces her father to the trembling husband, who then realizes his mistake in not reading all of the letter which told of the parent's coming. The three go into the other room where the cook and the butler laughingly tell of the mistake in identity.
Review Excerpt
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The Delicate Architecture of Marital Paranoia
Arthur Hotaling's 1914 vignette unfolds like a Swiss watch mechanism—precise, intricate, and capable of catastrophic malfunction when one gear slips. The husband, portrayed with jaw-clenching rigidity, exists in a perpetual state of emotional siege. Every rustle of his wife's skirt becomes an imagined betrayal, every exchanged glance with the butler a cryptographic message. His tragedy lies not in the letter's contents, but in his inability to imag..."
